Gratitude

I am grateful that I have a team of intelligent and kind researchers that work on my project with me. They say all PhD students go through slumps and downtime and perhaps many get into a rut because there was no one there to help them out or lift them up. But during my downest moments, where I was stretched paper thin, I had a team who continued to collect data, very good data... The project did not stall because of one student's failure to keep up, but it continued on because others helped out as they could.

A part of me feels ashamed that I did not collect all the data myself, but as B has told me, when good things happen to me, rather than feel guilt, why not feel gratitude? I am grateful that even as a small PhD student, I have a taste of working with an experienced and very qualified team to collect the best data we can. Now, it is time for me to process this data, and I shall do so with gratitude.

I will process it the best we can, make the best use of the data we can collected together, such that we can reveal the best truth and story from these data and write a report that may spark insights into the education system in Singapore and the meanings teacher make of citizenship education.

But more than that, I wish everybody will have fun, doing what we do, learning and studying together, figuring and pondering together.

"the existential loneliness of the long-distance writer"

I've ran two marathons in my life. Because of my perfectionistic tendencies and tendency for overachievement, when people ask me about my marathons, I sheepingly tell them I've ran two, but not very well. The first one I took 4 hours 20 minutes, the second one, I took 5 hours.

People often make it seem like a big feat but to me marathon running was much "easier" than other types of shorter runs where you had to run much faster. To me, marathon running was a lot of long slow distance, which suited my character that liked to take things easier. I preferred slow to fast, long to short etc.

We did a lot of training before hand to try to make the actual marathon more enjoyable. But, during the actual marathon itself, you will see the same effects of starting strong and persevering and finishing well with your depleted energy stores. You pay for misusing your energy stores as well, which I did for marathon 2. I was too eager to perform well that I ran the first half too fast, leading to a very slow second half.

Why am I talking about marathons? Today, I read this:

The more I give myself up to my run, let myself merge into and participate with the paths of Central Park, the more effortlessly I flow and finish. Each time I begin to brood about The Finish, my pace is broken, the run becomes a burden. And so it seems to be with writing a dissertation: the more the candidate is immersed in his files, flowing with his fieldwork, humming along on his office typewriter, deep, deep in the very stuff of the dissertation and conversely, less preoccupied with the magical/mystical Finish date, the faster the thesis is going to move ahead to completion. Obviously, this running/writing illustration is not designed to devalue the booklong insistence on organization and planning as fundamental to dissertation success. The point to be made - which many dissertation finishers and professional writers would affirm - is that, perhaps paradoxically, when one has planned and outlined, and planned again, what has to follow is, as Philip Roth might put it, a "letting-go," a self-absorbed merging with one's dissertation materials. (Sternberg, 1981, p. 175) 

Shuyi, it is time to focus on each element and work on them and let go and make the best of each situation. It is time to lose yourself in this work, not thinking of the end in mind. Like freediving, focusing on moment by moment, rather than the end goal. Process over outcome. Moment over finish.

Give it a try, I know it's hard. Hang in there and practice self-care too.